Ackmann Flying High In 1961, thirteen highly trained women aviators were summoned to Albuquerque, New Mexico, by Randolph Lovelace II, head of NASA's Special Advisory Committee on Life Sciences, for secret astronaut viability tests. Although the women performed beyond expectations, even better than some of their male counterparts, NASA curtailed Lovelace's experimental program just as the women were about to begin space-simulation exercises. As the thirteen American women waited in the wings, Valentina Tereshkova of Russia became the first woman in space. This pioneering group of women pilots became known as the Mercury 13, and are now credited with opening the doors of space for America's women astronauts. Martha Ackmann, MHC lecturer in women's studies and director of the College's Community-Based Learning Program, is writing the first full-length study of the secret women's astronaut program in a book to be published by Random House in 2003. In addition, CBS has optioned the book for a television event or miniseries. Ackmann first wrote about the Mercury 13 three years ago in a series of editorials, columns, and feature stories that appeared in more than two dozen leading newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Houston Chronicle. An announcement of Ackmann's upcoming book and CBS project recently appeared in Publisher's Weekly and Hollywood's Variety. Describing her book as a "sort of female Right Stuff," Variety detailed "the grueling endurance tests the women endured—from sensory-deprivation experiments to centrifuge tests, which at least one woman passed by wearing a full-length girdle for support." Ackmann says she hopes that her book "will document one of the forgotten chapters of U.S. aviation and space history, and will give recognition to thirteen courageous women, whose blend of skill, spirit of adventure, and patriotism was nothing short of extraordinary."

Mining Drabble Margaret Drabble's new novel is a thought-provoking tale of a family's evolution through three generations of women, writes President Joanne Creighton in a review in the April 22 edition of the Chicago Tribune. The Peppered Moth, Drabble's fourteenth novel, continues the author's lifelong preoccupation with the role of heredity and environment in shaping character, Creighton writes. Creighton, the author of Margaret Drabble, a book of literary criticism, writes that The Peppered Moth is "an important and interesting addition to Drabble's canon that links central preoccupations and stylistic devices of her early work with her later work." Like her early work, it draws from Drabble's family history, notably her troubled relationship with her mother; like her later work, it uses a personal story to tell the larger tale of the evolution of a people of a particular class and region, in this case a mining district in northern England in the early twentieth century.

Jacket required For the first-time author, there's nothing to compare with the experience of holding that very first volume, writes Brad Leithauser, Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities, in the April 23 edition of the New York Times. But even after you've had a few books published, Leithauser writes, there remains a new delight: the thrill of a beautiful dust jacket.
"Here is something both intimately related to your book--nothing less than the clothing it will wear on library shelves into perpetuity -- and yet detached from it. You can crow about a book's appearance with an abandon that would, for most of us, feel unseemly if devoted to the contents themselves," Leithauser writes in Writers on Writing: The Glory of a First Book. He recalls that when his first novel was accepted for publication in 1984, he volunteered to cover the additional cost of having the volume bound in a full-cloth binding. The editor-in-chief, amused because "writers rarely volunteer to pay for anything," agreed to the expense.

When, chosen as a judge for a major fiction prize, Leithauser received 200 books to read, he was struck by the indifference to appearances revealed in the "ugliness" and "shoddiness" of many dust jackets. "If as a conscientious parent you wouldn't send your child out into a blizzard wearing a skimpy jacket," he writes, "why release your novel into a possible blizzard of icy reviews wearing an inadequate dust jacket?"

Leithauser's most recent, well-dressed novel, A Few Corrections, was published last month by Knopf.

Mellon Post in Perry's Future Susan Perry, College librarian and director of Library, Information and Technology Services, will retire from Mount Holyoke at the end of the summer to devote her energies to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's regional centers for teaching and technology. In addition to her position as a senior program director at the Mellon Foundation, she will serve as co-dean of the Frye Institute and assume a lead role with the Council of Library and Information Resources. In a letter announcing Perry's departure, Don O'Shea, dean of faculty, wrote, “Susan will now deploy her formidable talents on a national level, and we at Mount Holyoke can take some consolation, and much pride, in knowing that Susan's future work will benefit the faculties and students of educational institutions across the land.” He expressed gratitude for Perry's warmth and hard work, and noted that finding a successor “will be a challenge.” O'Shea also notes that Perry has offered to stay on in a limited capacity to help the department through the transition period, should a successor not be in place by early fall.

Campus to Welcome Librarians-in-Training MHC has offered its facilities to Simmons College in a unique cooperative effort to help lesson the national librarian shortage. The Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), which has the largest library and information sciences master's degree program in the nation, will offer classes in a two-year master's degree program on Saturdays and during the summer at MHC, beginning in September. Simmons faculty will teach the courses. Simons's GSLIS dean, James Matarazzo, states in a press release that expanding the program beyond the Boston area "to more easily serve people in western and central New England” may contribute significantly to solving the librarian deficit. The release notes that, according to national studies, “There will be a shortage of more than 40,000 librarians by the beginning of the next decade." Students earning a Simmons degree at MHC will also have full privileges at the Simmons Boston campus.

What's new with you? Send news for “New & Notable” to Janet Tobin, Office of Communications, or email jtobin@mtholyoke.edu.